“One, two, three, fawhr!” That complicated-but-unforgettable chord on George’s 12-string Rickenbacker. The sounds of crowd noises and a band warming up….

Chances are these descriptions brought to mind “I Saw Her Standing There,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The openings of these songs immediately capture the listener’s attention and make the song memorable. If the openings didn’t work, no one would listen to the rest of the songs.

The same principle applies in writing as well as in music. With so many other things clamoring for attention, it can be difficult to find time to read, so when you do have time, you want to read something interesting. If the opening paragraphs or pages don’t interest you, why continue? A lifeless, confusing opening will deter readers – and if you ever try to sell a story, the editors as well. Many editors will only read the first page or two of a story  – sometimes just the first couple of paragraphs – to decide if it’s worth buying.

Writing effective openings can be difficult, but keeping certain principles in mind will make it easier. In this essay, I will first discuss the tasks a strong opening must do, drawing on Ansen Dibell’s Plot (part of the Elements of Fiction Writing series put out by Writer’s Digest Books). I will then illustrate these tasks with hypothetical and actual openings of my story Move Over Ms. L.  I’ll focus on my own story because I can explain how I composed this opening to make it work.

The Three Functions of an Opening

Dibell describes what an opening must do so clearly that I’ll simply quote her:

Every effective beginning needs to do three things. The chief of these is to get the story going and show what kind of story it’s going to be. The second is to introduce and characterize the protagonist. The third is to engage the reader’s interest in reading on. … A story [sic] can do more than these three things, but it should never do less (1988, p. 21).

Getting the story going: A story can be roughly defined as a series of connected events, one causing the other, that lead to increasing conflict which is resolved by the end of the story. As an author, you need to find the first link in the chain of events and start your story there. For example, if you’re writing a “American girl goes to England and meets Beatle” story, start at the point where your heroine decides to make the trip, or even where she arrives in England and is deciding what to do next. It’s not necessary to show a typical “day in the life” of your heroine before starting the actual story; in fact, such an opening slows the story down. If you need those details in the story, you can weave them in later. (For instance, if it’s important that your character doesn’t attend many parties, you can say something like, “It was eleven o’clock and the party was just beginning, but Sally had to hide a yawn – she normally was sleeping by ten.”) And make the beginning a scene with conflict – perhaps the girl’s parents don’t want her to go to England, or the friend she expects to stay with can’t put her up. Conflict will not only get the plot of the story going, but it will also characterize your heroine and engage interest in the story.

Besides putting the plot in motion, the beginning should also establish the setting (time and place) and the type of story you’re writing, be it science fiction, drama, or romance. You don’t need to start off by saying “Hamburg, 1962,” or “The Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964,” but you can provide details that let the readers infer where and when your story is set. And if you’re going to whisk the Beatles off to a magical land, then you should give clues that magic works in your story early on; if you don’t, when the magic arrives, your readers will be confused because they didn’t expect it.

Introducing Your Protagonist: I always start a story with the most important character so my readers know who that is. The most important character in any story is the one most involved with the plot; he or she may have suffered a loss or is threatened with a loss. He or she will be the one who resolves the plot through his or her actions.

Many writers who do start with the main character will begin the story by giving a complete description and history of that person. This can be a problem for a couple of reasons: the writers tell the readers about their characters when they should show the characters in action. Simply listing key features about your character can seem like the easiest way to characterize him or her because it’s so compact; you can say a lot in a couple of paragraphs. Unfortunately, your readers may not remember all these details because they don’t make an impression. Also, you can be tempted into giving information the reader doesn’t need; if your character is a secretary but never does any secretarial work in the story, why tell us what she does? Finally, writers might spend more time describing what their heroine looks like than what she’s like as a person. As Dibell says, “Sometimes the most important thing about a person isn’t how he looks, but what he’s like, how he behaves, how and what he thinks, how he reacts, even how he talks.” (p. 24) Although a character’s appearance can be important, especially in a romance, it shouldn’t be the most important thing about her or him. Focus on a couple of key personality traits and weave physical description into the story where it’s appropriate.

Engaging the Reader’s Interest: As I said before, if readers don’t find the opening of a story interesting, chances are they won’t bother to read the rest of the story. So what makes an opening interesting? There are two types of effective openings: those that start in the middle of some melodramatic event, such as a fight or natural disaster, and those that pose some intriguing question, such as what are the Beatles doing in this exotic location? Sometimes even a well-turned phrase can lure your readers into the rest of the story. It’s up to you as a writer to decide which type of opening best suits the rest of the story. Since the opening sets up expectations for the rest of the story, you have to make sure the end of the story comes naturally from the opening.

Now that we’ve gone over what an opening must do, let’s look at two possible openings for my story, Move Over Ms. L., and discuss what makes them effective or lifeless.

Case Study: Two Openings for Move Over Ms. L.

In case you haven’t read Move Over Ms. L. (and if you haven’t, I hope you will), it’s told from the first-person viewpoint of Joanna Lennon, John’s great-granddaughter. (Obviously, this story is science fiction set in the future.) When it becomes possible to travel to another, parallel universe equivalent to our 1961, she is sent on a mission to obtain cell samples from John so he can be cloned. The music industry hopes John’s clone will be as great a musician as John was, but if he isn’t, they’ll use him as a “John Lennon impersonator.” Jo doesn’t approve of this idea – in fact, she doesn’t even care too much for her great-grandfather, since she looks very much like him and resents being constantly compared to him. And since her parents are divorced and her mother is sick with a stronger, more infectious version of AIDS, Jo has a chip on her shoulders that’s bigger than her feet. Meeting her great-granddad could either heal her or break her spirit; you’ll have to read the whole story to find out how John affects Joanna.

I could have chosen to start her story as shown below (this is an example I’m writing specifically for this essay):

Hi, my name is Joanna Lennon. I’m John’s great-granddaughter, and I want to tell you about a year that changed my life in ways I didn’t think possible.

Ever since I was a little girl, people always said that I looked a lot like John. I have his nose and his chin, and I even have a mole in the middle of my forehead like he had. Thanks to Great-Grandma Yoko, I have a slightly darker complexion and eyes that are sort of Asian, but otherwise it’s John’s genes that are dominant in me. I’ve always hated the way people compare me to him and ask me if I’m a musician like he was. Probably the only good thing about my resemblance to John is that it got me interested in genetics when I was a kid. I started college planning to become a geneticist, but I had to drop out when my Mom got very sick with TransAIDS and had to move to a private and expensive clinic. My parents are divorced, and although my dad has his share of John and Yoko’s money, the pre-nuptial agreement specified that any alimony payments be handled by the Ono Lennon Estate, which my Uncle Jack controls. He has to be the worst musician I’ve ever heard, but he’s determined to make me or one of my cousins into the next John. When I refused to sign a recording contract, he cut the alimony payment to just enough to take care of Mom’s medical bills, but not enough for me to pay tuition. I had to take a lab technician job with a company that clones organs for transplants, and my co-workers are so lazy I have to do almost all of the work myself.

Things changed forever one day when I received a call from the receptionist, telling me I’d been selected to participate in a project that might earn me a bonus….

That was about 320 words. I’ll take a slightly longer section (about 360 words) from the actual beginning of the story:

The cel always goes off when you’re in the middle of something uninterruptable, like sampling kidneys. My elbow-length gloves were immersed in ripe-smelling nutrient broth as I carefully cornered the Brooks-Jones kidney, trying not to squeeze it. Just when I had it, the receiver vibrated in my ear. I cursed as my hands slipped and the half-grown kidney darted off to the other side of the compartment. Good thing my cursing didn’t activate the speaker pinned to my lab coat. I activated the speaker instead with my chin. “Jo here.”

"This is Catherine, Jo.” The receptionist; she could only want one thing. “Are you busy?”

I triumphantly grasped the squishy organ. “I’m in the middle of sampling.”

"Isn’t there another tech out there who can take over?”

There were three, but they were busy discussing last night’s holo. God forbid I interrupt them for something less important. I sampled some cells from the kidney with a syringe and injected them into the auto-analyzer. As I waited for results, I asked, “Does Ed want to show me off to another set of clients again?"

I hated that for two reasons. I never liked being on display, of course, especially with a face like mine. Even people who didn’t know anything about TwenCen music knew my face, thanks to all the ads with my great-grandparents. Also, every time Ed showed me off, he made it sound as if Golden Helix had sculpted my features. I don’t know why he did that; Golden Helix grows organs for transplants. It has nothing to do with gene sculpting. Besides, I came by my great-granddad’s face honestly, through my dad.

Lucky me.

Silence. Then Catherine said, “Yes, but it’s not what you’re thinking. Your name has been brought up for an important assignment. I think it would pay a considerable bonus.”

A bonus! The magic word, even better than please. Mom’s medicines and the board at the TransAIDS Long-Term Care Clinic consumed her alimony, which was why I had to sample kidneys for a living. A bonus would be very helpful. I might even get to go back to school for another semester.

Let’s compare how well these two openings set the story in motion, introduce the main character, and pique the interest of the reader.

Although the first opening alludes to the plot in the first paragraph by saying these events changed Jo’s life, the plot doesn’t actually start until the third paragraph, when Jo receives the call from the receptionist. We’re also told about this call; it isn’t shown in a scene. Consequently, we get very little sense of the setting. We can guess this is a science fiction story because John can’t have a great-granddaughter in our time (Sean, hurry up and get married!) and because she mentions things that aren’t possible yet, such as cloning organs and humans. Still, this opening starts off very slowly.

The second opening begins at the point when Jo gets the call from the receptionist and presents it in a scene which continues past this excerpt. Although the conflict is mild – Jo has different priorities than the receptionist – it’s still there, and it foreshadows the conflict Jo will have with other authority figures later. Since this is a scene, we experience with Jo what her immediate environment is like; we can hear, touch, and smell it. There are also other clues that this story is set in the future; besides the cloned organs, Jo uses technology more advanced than ours. All of this establishes the plot and the setting much more effectively than the first story did.

Now let’s look at character development. At first glance, the first opening might seem to be the better one here – we get Jo’s first and last name, description, and personal history. The other opening offers up these details more slowly; some of them don’t appear for pages yet. But remember what Dibell said; sometimes other details matter more. In this case, one of the main differences between the two openings is attitude. In the first opening, Jo comes across as pleasant but bland and ordinary; she tells important details of her life without much emotion. In contrast, Jo’s barely-controlled anger pulses in every line of the second opening and makes her quite credible as a Lennon descendant. She tells you less about herself up front, but she’s far more vivid in the second opening than the first, the kind of character who pulls writer and readers into her world and insists you pay attention to her. And if you read closely, you see that some of the important parts of her background (descended from a twentieth-century musician whom she resembles, divorced parents, sick mother) are mentioned in this opening. I may be biased, but I think the second opening establishes Jo’s character more effectively than the first one does.

Finally, which opening is more interesting? The first opening doesn’t have much to offer here besides telling us immediately that Jo is John’s great-granddaughter. If you don’t find that idea interesting, there isn’t much else here to attract readers. The second story, however, has a scene with concrete details and a strong heroine to get us interested. I also designed the first line with a deliberate hook – pairing an everyday occurrence (being distracted from a task by a phone call) with something a little more unusual (sampling tissues from kidneys). Although I knew the “sampling kidneys” phrase might offend sensitive readers, I figured it would make other readers curious as to what exactly that meant. I haven’t had any e-mail from people telling me they were offended by the opening of my story, but I have heard from other people who were so hooked by the story that they read all three parts of it in one sitting.

Does this mean that you must begin every story like this? Not necessarily; it depends on the needs of your story. Sometimes plot might be the most important part of the story, but sometimes character development is more important. You have to pick the opening that best suits your work – and if your work changes as you write, don’t be afraid to go back and rewrite the opening. Sometimes it’s also OK to break writing rules – such as beginning with a scene – if you do so for a good reason and compensate in other ways – such as using a narrator with a compelling personality. Read other stories and other books on writing to learn what works and what doesn’t.

I hope you found this essay helpful in figuring out how to start your next story. Now it’s time for me to return to writing fiction – and so should you. Don’t let the blank computer screen terrify you; just pick a point to begin writing your story. You can always revise it later. Happy writing!

Sandra Ulbrich started her writing career in high school, when she made up her own lyrics to songs. She soon graduated to writing sonnets, villanelles, and free verse. After obtaining her bachelor's degree in molecular biology/English and a Master of Technical and Scientific Communication degree, she worked as a teaching assistant, a science writing intern at the National Cancer Institute, a technical writer, and a proofreader. She is currently a lab technician at an enyzme-producing company. In addition to writing poetry, Sandra has also written a fantasy novel called Day of All Seasons, which has been submitted for publication. She is currently writing a sequel, called Fifth Season. When not writing, Sandra enjoys listening to classic rock (especially the Beatles), reading, gaming, attending cons, and chatting with her friends.